Architecture triumphs again on the home front

Home Of The Year RTÉ One, Tuesday

DIY SOS: The Big Build BBC1, Monday

Death In Paradise BBC1, Thursday

Home Of The Year always leaves me very conflicted. The smash-hit RTÉ snoop show (and who doesn’t love rifling through someone else’s kitchen presses, or lifting the rugs to see if there’s any dust?) always seems to have tension at its heart – what is a house, and what is a home? The judging panel is led by ‘design legend Hugh Wallace’ – the phrase is repeated so often it actually might be his full birth name – and with an interior designer and an architect in tow. Gone since the last series are Deirdre Whelan and Peter Crowley, the latter of whom did a very funny sceptical routine with Wallace and is greatly missed. So too, it has to be said, is Deirdre, who was all about the ‘pops’ of colour here and there – no one ever loved a cushion quite as much as she did, with the possible exception of an enthusiastic puppy.

Her replacement Suzie McAdam showed up in preposterous oversized heart-shaped glasses and my first thought was to shout, East-Enders-style: ‘You’re not my real Mum.’ She was joined by architect Amanda Bone who, suffering perhaps from first-night nerves, seemed anxious to prove she had a degree from the University of the Bleeding Obvious.

Stepping from the kitchen into the garden, she proclaimed: ‘These doors are really easy to open’, as indeed they tend to be unless you live in a brick building on the North Circular Road or in Portlaoise.

In a bedroom, she chirped: ‘There’s so much daylight coming in the window.’ My sister is staying with me in our lockdown bubble and, as one, we both said aloud, ‘well, it’s hardly likely to come down the chimney, is it?’ There might have been another word before ‘chimney’, but this is a family newspaper.

The first home up for assessment was a renovated and extended farmhouse in Co. Clare, and here I agreed with Wallace – it was well designed but there was too much white everywhere, which left it feeling a bit clinical for my taste.

The second was a detached new build in a Westmeath housing estate and it was extraordinary. The owners had a brilliant eye for detail and subverted every cliché of what such a house should look like. There were bold colours everywhere and the living room was not, as so often is the case, designed around a television. It was so terrific, in fact, I knew it hadn’t a mongrel’s chance of winning Best In Show at Crufts.

The honours went to the third house, which admittedly was dramatic, rising from the Co. Cork landscape like a big black barn. The furniture was eclectic, to say the least – a baby grand piano served as the kitchen island, so perhaps that made it a Chopin board to match the Beeth-oven (right, I’ll get me coat). It was playful, yes, but the whole feel was of an art installation rather than a home.

It felt inevitable it would win, but it still seemed to follow the pattern that it’s architecture and not homeliness that triumphs – never was that more evident than when a mansion in Belfast, admittedly beautifully restored but for hundreds of thousands of pounds, took top spot a few years back.

‘Home’ speaks of so many things – comfort, your own memories and not bought ones, a lived-in feel – and I can’t remember a year I agreed with the final verdict. I’m fairly certain already this year won’t break the mould.

One home that really did need a makeover was a family home in Devon. Jan and Lucy Collins have triplet girls Lola, Daisy and Amber, and boys Hadley and Kenneth. Two of the girls were born with nephrotic syndrome and they need 70 hours of kidney dialysis a week until they can find donors. Their house was small, and the garage was taken up with a tonne of supplies delivered every month for their medical needs, and it was clear that parents Jan and Lucy were at their wits’ end.

So, along came Nick Knowles and the DIY SOS crew, and designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and they ripped it apart and put it back together in a way that bordered on a miracle. Just like the Irish version with Baz Ashmawy shown before Christmas, there was something truly lovely about seeing the parents’ emotion as they toured their new home and realised that at last they might have some respite from the gruelling schedule that has been their daily lives; there even was CCTV so they can monitor the children while in their own bedroom.

It’s brilliant lockdown television, watching the volunteers give the very best of their time and skill just to make someone’s else’s life better, and as usual, it left me in a heap by the end. Whatever troubles we have right now, we often don’t know the half of the challenges going on behind other front doors.

Death In Paradise came to an end for another year, and with it the departure of Sergeant JP Hooper, played by Tobi Bakare. JP has been front and centre for seven years and it felt like saying goodbye to an old friend, though the producers wisely signed up the brilliantly funny Tahj Miles as Marlon Price, whose former petty criminal to rookie cop storyline has been the highlight this year.

Frustratingly, though, the burgeoning relationship between British detective Neville (Ralf Little) and his fellow officer Florence (Josephine Jobert) was left on an infuriating cliffhanger that no doubt had much of Ireland and Britain shouting at the telly.

Nonetheless, there at least were a couple of scenes in that fantastic beach bar in Guadeloupe that somehow brightened up this very dull third lockdown. Maybe Amanda Bone is right – clearly, daylight can come from the television as well as through the bedroom window.